Redemption Ark

limbs of a human. Indeed, Skade saw, the thing within it was human, a shape she glimpsed in shattered parts rather than any unified whole. There was a ripple of dark clothing and a ripple of paler flesh.

Molenka?

Though she was only metres away, the reply felt astonishingly distant.

[Yes. It’s me. I’m trapped, Skade. Trapped inside part of the bubble.]

Skade shivered, impressed by the woman’s calm. She was clearly going to die, and yet her reporting of her predicament had an admirable detachment. It was the attitude of a true Conjoiner, convinced that her essence would live on in the wider consciousness of the Mother Nest, and that physical death amounted only to the removal of an inessential peripheral element from a much more significant whole. But, Skade reminded herself, they were a long way from the Mother Nest now. The bubble, Molenka?

[It fragmented as it passed through the ship. It glued itself to me, almost deliberately. Almost as if it was looking for someone to surround, someone to embed within itself.] The five-pointed thing wobbled revoltingly, hinting at some awful instability that was on the point of collapsing.

What state are you in, Molenka?

[It must be state one, Skade… I don’t feel any different. Just trapped… and distant. I feel very, very distant.] The bubble fragment began to contract, exactly as Molenka had said it was likely to do. The body-shaped membrane shrunk down until its surface conformed closely with Molenka’s body. For a dreadful moment she looked quite normal, except that she was covered in a shifting glaze of pearly light. Skade dared to hope that the bubble would choose that instant to collapse, freeing Molenka. But at the same time she knew it was not about to happen.

The bubble quivered again, hiccoughed and twitched. Molenka’s expression — it was quite visible — became obviously frightened. Even through the faint neural channel that connected them, Skade felt the woman’s fear and apprehension. It was as if the glaze was tightening around her.

[Help me, Skade. I can’t breathe.]

I can’t. I don’t know what to do.

Molenka’s skin was tight against the membrane. She was starting to suffocate. Normal speech would have been impossible by now, but the automatic routines in her head would have already started shutting down non- essential parts of her brain, conserving vital resources to squeeze three or four extra minutes of consciousness from her last breath. [Help me. Please…]

The membrane tightened further. Skade watched, unable to turn away, as it squeezed Molenka. Her pain gushed across the neural link. It was all that Skade recognised: there was no further room for rational thought. She reached out, desperate to do something even if the gesture was hopeless. Her fingers skimmed the surface of the membrane. It shrank further, hastened by the contact. The neural link began to break up. The collapsing membrane was crushing Molenka alive, the pressure destroying the delicate loom of Conjoiner implants that floated in her skull.

The membrane halted, quivered, and then shrank down with shocking speed. When Molenka was three- quarters of her normal size, the figure within the membrane turned abruptly scarlet. Skade felt the screaming howl of abrupt neural severance before her own implants curtailed the link. Molenka was dead. But the human-shaped form lingered even as it collapsed further. Now it was a mannequin, now a horrid marionette, now a doll, now a thumb-sized figurine, losing shape and definition as the material within liquefied. Then the contraction stopped, the milky envelope stabilising.

Skade reached out and grasped the marble-sized thing that had been Molenka, knowing that she must dispose of it into vacuum before the field contracted even further. The matter within the membrane — that matter that had once been Molenka — was already under savage compression, and she did not want to think about what would happen should it spontaneously expand.

She tugged at the marble, but the thing barely moved, as if it were locked rigid at that precise point in space and time. She increased her suit’s strength and finally the marble began to shift. It had all of Molenka’s inertial mass within it, perhaps more, and it would be just as difficult to stop or steer.

Skade began to make her laborious way to the nearest dorsal airlock.

The projection helix spun up to speed. Clavain stood with his hands on the railing that surrounded it, peering at the indistinct shape that appeared within the cylinder. It resembled a squashed bug, a fan of soft ropelike entrails spilling from one end of a hard, dark carapace.

‘She isn’t going anywhere in a hurry,’ Scorpio said.

‘Dead in the water,’ Antoinette Bax concurred. She whistled. ‘She’s drifting, just falling through space. Holy shit. What do you think happened to her?’

‘Something bad, but not something catastrophic,’ Clavain said quietly, ‘or else we wouldn’t see her at all. Scorp, can you zoom in and enhance the rear section? It looks like something happened there.’

Scorpio was controlling the hull cameras, slaved to pan over the drifting starship as they slammed past it with a velocity differential of more than a thousand kilometres per second. They would be within effective weapons range for only an hour. Zodiacal Light was not even accelerating at the moment; the inertia-suppressing systems were switched off and the engines were quiet. Great flywheels had spun the lighthugger’s habitation core up to one gee of centrifugal gravity. Clavain enjoyed not having to struggle around under higher gravity or wear an exoskeletal rig. It was even more pleasant not having to suffer the disturbing physiological effects of the inertia-suppression field.

‘There,’ Scorpio said when he had finished adjusting the settings. ‘That’s as clear as it’s going to get, Clavain.’

‘Thanks.’

Remontoire, the only one amongst them still wearing an exoskeletal rig, stepped closer to the cylinder, brushing past Pauline Sukhoi with a whirr of servos.

‘I don’t recognise those structures, Clavain, but they look intentional.’

Clavain nodded. That was his opinion as well. The basic shape of the light-hugger was still as it should have been, but from her rear erupted a complicated splay of twisted filaments and arcs, like the mainsprings and ratchets of some clockwork mechanism caught in the act of exploding.

‘Would you care to speculate?’ Clavain asked Remontoire.

‘She was desperate to escape us, desperate to pull ahead. She might have considered something extreme.’

‘Extreme?’ Xavier asked. He had one hand around Antoinette’s waist. The two of them were filthy with machine oil.

‘She already had inertia suppression,’ Remontoire said. ‘But 1 think this was something else — a modification of the same equipment to push it into a different state.’

‘Such as?’ Xavier asked.

Clavain looked at Remontoire, too.

Remontoire said, ‘The technology will suppress inertial mass — that’s what Skade called a state-two field — but it doesn’t remove it entirely. In a state-three field, however, all inertial mass drops to zero. Matter becomes photonic, unable to travel at anything other than the speed of light. Time dilation becomes infinite, so the ship would remain frozen in the photonic state until the end of time.’

Clavain nodded at his friend. Remtontoire appeared perfectly willing to wear the exoskeleton even though it was functioning as a form of restraint, capable of immobilising him should Clavain decide that he could not be trusted.

‘What about state four?’ Clavain asked.

‘That might be more useful,’ Remontoire said. ‘If she could tunnel through state three, skipping it entirely, she might be able to achieve a smooth transition to a state-four field. Inside that field, the ship would flip into a tachyonic mass state, unable to do anything but travel faster than light.’

‘Skade tried that?’ Xavier asked reverently.

‘It’s as good an explanation as any I can think of,’ Remontoire said.

‘What do you think happened?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Some sort of field instability,’ Pauline Sukhoi said, the pale reflection of her haunted face hanging in the display tank. She spoke slowly and solemnly. ‘Managing a bubble of altered space-time makes fusion containment look like the kind of game children play on their birthdays. My suspicion is that Skade first created a microscopic